Sunday, December 26, 2010

Christmas Bonus!

Here's a Christmas bonus I didn't expect. A few days before the Holiday, Marvel Comics returned a bunch of my original art to me. It was a giant pile of pages I did in the mid-nineties of various Harvey characters. At the time Harvey was experiencing a bit of a renewed interest in their properties, thanks to the Casper live action movie and the Richie Rich TV cartoon. The character designs on these pages are based on those interpretations of the characters, so don't blame me.

It's interesting for me to see these again. I haven't seen them in fourteen years, give or take. Some of them, I don't even remember doing! Also, no apologies for the quality. Fourteen years and all... Another note, only the pencils are mine; Inks and lettering were by other folks.

8 Comments:

My Marvel/Harvey experience was pretty wonderful, mostly because I got to work with Sid Jacobson, a wonderful editor, and Angelo DeCeserae, an absolutely fantastic writer. His scripts were a joy to illustrate: so full of inventive ideas and wonderful character moments. The fact that he is not more well known is the comic industry's loss.

At first, I hated working on the "new" designs of the characters. Over I time, though, I started to get comfortable with them. Actually, it took some pressure off, to not have to follow Warren Kremer's Richie models. He later told me, of course, how much he hated these designs. I totally understand where he was coming from, but I shudder to think what he would have said about MY versions of his designs.

I did grow to love drawing the Ghostly Trio. Their designs lent themselves to lots of great "acting". It helped that back then, my son (age 5) was a big Stinkie fan, and delighted in the drawings I did of him.

Bill: Casper is pretty different, but I sort of like it. It's fresh. All is very well drawn, very lively and very animated. I like it all a great deal - particularily Reginald Van Dough! I wish there was more!

Hi there! I would like to tell you that I have a copy of that Casper magazine. It wasn't easy to find it, but is one of my main references. I'm a cartoonist too, and also a fan of Casper, so I draw the trio more often than not. I agree with your remark, the trio are specially fun to draw due to the fact that they're very expressive.

I wish I could find the number of the magazine in which Kibosh appears, you did a very good job there too.